Problems at Posterous: Possible outage, private messages shared

Updated. Posterous is currently having “server connectivity issues” that have made the site inaccessible to a number of users. The problems apparently began with “image uploading” issues, but currently are affecting the whole site, according to posts made Wednesday on Posterous’ Twitter page:

We're looking into some connectivity issues with our servers right now and hope to have them resolved shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience!

The apparent outage occurred less than an hour after we received a report from a source whose email inbox was inundated midday Wednesday with a series of posts from random Posterous groups, a number of which were apparently meant to be private.

Posterous emails typically contain all the content of the post, including photos. Posterous is a popular blogging platform that bills itself as “the easiest way to share safely online.”

The recipient of these messages told me via email: “I got like 60 emails from 11:58am Tuesday to 12:10pm — if you click on the link you’ll see that it’s private [because the post is] password-protected when you click through.” Some of the emails he has received by accident include “X-rated” content, which could be evidence of spam. But other messages are from standard-looking private family groups.

A Posterous representative said the company is looking into the email issue, and has heard one other report of such activity in the past two days: “We have seen a pretty big spike in usage over the last week, some of which has been driven by increased spam. Our hunch is that this is what the user saw but we definitely want to confirm.”

The spokesperson also said that the email issue and the server connectivity issue are “unrelated.”

Update: After an 18 minute outage, the Posterous servers are now back up and running, according to the company:

The email issue is still being looked into, we’re told. We’ll continue to update this post with any additional details we receive.

Update 2: A Posterous spokesperson tells us the email glitch has also been corrected. He emailed us this update on Wednesday afternoon:

The issue was caused by a service update that failed to roll out successfully to all our servers late last week. As a result, 616 Posterous Spaces’ users received email notifications from Spaces they were not following. In some cases, it was only a few emails, for others, it was hundreds of emails. We’re embarrassed that this happened and will be sending apologies to everyone who received the random emails. We just implemented extra steps to prevent this from happening again and are now back operating normally.